This new VM replaces the previously available Visual Studio 11 Beta ALM virtual machine to use the latest Visual Studio 2012 RC releases.

This is hands-down the most comprehensive ALM virtual machine yet. It includes 18 hands-on-labs / demo scripts. 6 of these were upgraded from the Visual Studio 11 ALM virtual machine, 11 of these were upgraded from the older Visual Studio 2010 ALM virtual machine, and one is brand new, highlighting the PreEmptive Analytics integration in Team Foundation Server 2012. Phew!

Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012 covers the full breadth of ALM capabilities available in Visual Studio 2012, Team Foundation Server 2012, and related technologies. This book has something for the entire extended development team – whether you are a project manager, software developer, software tester, architect, manager, or a jack of all trades. Topics covered include:

Professional Team Foundation Server 2012 dives deeper into Team Foundation Server 2012 and is intended for anybody who needs to install, administer, or perform advanced configuration tasks with Team Foundation Server 2012:

Installation

Configuration

Topologies

Backup

Disaster Recovery

Customization and Extensibility

And much more…

These books are the follow-up books to the 2010 editions of these titles (which you can still order here and here). The 2012 books have been more than 50% revised to include changes and additions in the 2012 release.

Both of the 2012 books are available for pre-order now, and are expected to release in the next few months:

These books are a collaborative effort between myself and my awesome co-authors: Mickey Gousset, Ed Blankenship, Martin Woodward, and Grant Holliday. Together we make up Microsoft employees and Visual Studio ALM MVP’s with a combined total of more than 30 years working in the ALM space with tools such as Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server.

Thank you to everyone who bought the 2010 books. Your support, feedback, and encouragement made it an easy decision to invest the time and energy into these new editions. I hope you will enjoy them!

One of the nice new features in Microsoft Test Manager 2012 is the ability to conduct rich testing of Metro style applications running on Windows 8. When testing applications in this manner, Microsoft Test Manager will automatically capture rich diagnostics from the Windows 8 machine. This can include video of the tester interacting with the application, or a new rich action log which gets produced in HTML and shows "tap by tap" what the tester was doing leading up to the bug they encountered, making it easier for a developer to quickly understand the bug that the tester found and - most importantly - to get it fixed.

I recorded a video which illustrates this great new capability. I hope you will find it useful as you are building great Windows 8 applications!

Click through to the post on Channel 9 to get links to the download locations for the components you will need to try this yourself.

With this free app, you can connect to TFS and use your phone to follow along with the TMap process wherever you go. It’s a great looking application and another good example of using the OData Service for Team Foundation Server from a Windows Phone application. To get started, check out Clemens’ blog post.